


Burning Wrong

by Elivira



Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Anger, Angst, Character Study, F/M, Full Shift Werewolves, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Female Character, Pack Dynamics, Werewolves, Wolf Pack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:01:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26026894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elivira/pseuds/Elivira
Summary: Leah is angry. She's so angry that sometimes she can't even think through it. Her thoughts and mind a blur of hatehatehate so thick she can’t pull herself from it.A character study on Leah’s anger.
Relationships: Leah Clearwater & Sam Uley, Past Sam Uley/Leah Clearwater, Sam Uley/Emily Young
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Burning Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> Well here I am writing Twilight fanfiction at 22... I love Leah, I’ve always liked her and I wish we’d seen more of her. This is probably the most angsty thing I’ve ever written but it’s Leah so. 🤷
> 
> Enjoy! And as always CC is 100% welcome but let’s please keep it productive.
> 
> Title from the poem “Anger Lay by Me” but Elizabeth Daryush.

**Anger**

Leah is angry. She's so angry that sometimes she can't even think through it. Her thoughts and mind a blur of  _ hatehatehate  _ so thick she can’t pull herself from it. She’s angry at Sam and at Emily and at her parents and at the fucking trees. She thinks of the Sammy she used to love and the Em she used to consider her sister and she wants to cry livid tears from it all. She hates them. She hates them so much she can't breathe with how it feels, the anger violent and twisting.

In her most lucid moments, she can admit to herself that beneath the hate she truely misses them. Misses them like breathing, and that makes her even more livid, more angry, until again she can’t breath, can’t think with how it consumes her.

She misses Em. The Em who talked with her about boys on the beach, their voices quiet and as girly as Leah had ever allowed herself to be. As they rested their heads on each other's shoulders and laughed until the sound blocked out the world around them. She misses the Sammy who never expected her to be anyone but herself, tall tomboy Leah who wouldn’t know one end of a lipstick from the other. She misses the Sammy who she trusted and gave everything to, and knew from the bottom of her heart would never betray her.  Most of all, she misses the two people in her life that weren’t obligated to love her, but still did. The people who chose her as she chose them, and the knowledge that nothing could break them apart. 

Until it did. 

The anger follows her through the shift and hangs over her like a fog she can’t shake off.   
  


**Wolf**

Sometimes, when Leah is a wolf, she can forget, let go of her anger and run, run, run. Let the wolf take control and feel the pads of her paws hit the earth in a grounding rhythm. In those moments, Leah can leave it all behind. So she waits for her chance, does her duty to her people as best she can without acknowledging that the object of her hate is there all the time, inescapable. Leah still can’t look at Sam. She hangs on the outskirts of pack meetings like the outsider she knows she is. None of Sam’s minions ( _ Pack _ , her wolf says,  _ my pack _ ) talk to her on their own and she doesn't talk to them unless she has to. She gets her assignment for patrol and slinks off.

In the woods she slips out of her clothes quickly. The air is clean and fresh and smells like the deer that passed by four hours ago, she can hear a mouse in the underbrush ten feet to her left, and a rabbit a hundred to her right. Her mind rebels for a moment at the unnaturalness of it and she fights the urge to scratch at her arms. She shifts. 

The voices fill her head then, Brady wondering what's for lunch, ‘ _ Maybe hotdogs?’,  _ flashes of Pauls last fuck, and behind it all the constant mantra of ‘ _ EmilyEmilyEmily’ _ , ‘ _ KimKimKim’ _ , and ‘ _ ClaireClaireClaire’ _ that Sam, Jared and Quill give off. It burns like fire in Leah's veins, the hate, the resentment, and the loss, their internal monologue like salt in her wounds. A reminder that she wasn’t good, wasn’t strong enough, just wasn’t  _ enough _ to be the Alpha’s mate. 

Leah runs. She maps out the boundary of their territory three times over by the time her shift officially starts, the pound of her paws hitting the ground all she lets herself feel.

_ ‘Leah…’  _ Sam directs at her.

_ ‘Alpha’  _ Leah sends back, pushing all of her anger and disaproval at him with that one word. Her wolf rebels at it, and she knows she shouldn’t. Leah can’t help it though, if he wants her to stop, to talk, to  _ forgive _ he'll have to try harder to that.

He retreats, like he always does, and part of her, the part she keeps so far hidden that none of her packmates have ever even glimpsed it, wants to yell. It's worse like this, with him nice and trying to reach out. She wants back the time when they could just stay out of eachothers way. Now all he is is nice and friendly and she just wants him to yell, to be angry with her, so she can yell, scream at her, so she can scream at him. All she gets though, are his wounded expressions and his sympathy, and that's far worse than any harsh words he could ever push her way.

**Shift**

The second night after her father dies she spends it crying. The first was spent in the pain of her first shift, nothing but the confusion, and the fear, and the knowledge that  _ something wasn’t right,  _ the only things that broke through to her. The second night though, when she gets away from it all, away from the shitshow that her life had become, she curls up on her childhood bed and cries. She cries for her father. She cries for the future he never got to see her have, and the goodbyes she didn't get to say. Leah cries for Sam and Emily. She cries because she sees it, replaying in her head as she’d seen in Sam’s; Emily as Sam had seen her that first moment, felt the inevitability of the imprint and the horror Sam felt. She saw the Emily who fought it, the Emiliy who yelled at him “How could you do this to her?!” “She doesn’t deserve this!” She feels Sam’s anger and confusion and sees Emily as she stumbles back, falls to the ground, her hands coming up to cup her face, blood running red and dark though her fingers and down her arm.

Leah understands in that moment and cries. She cries for the future that was never going to be hers, and she cries for a future that Emily, oh God poor Emily, had torn away from her. One free of this bullshit, free of scars, and free of the hate that Leah can’t let go of. She knows, as her wolf knows, that they couldn’t help it, but she can’t forget the betrayal, she’d felt the moment she’d realized. It sticks to her like a burr. Emily had been Leah’s best friend, and Sam had been her fiance and Leah just can't help but be angry, can’t help the anger that wells up within her.

Why did the gods or the spirits or whomever might be up there watching choose them? Why Sam and Emily? And why Leah? Why did the shift take her and Seth? Her sweet baby brother, who screams she can still hear, as all the bones in his body broke, to be rebuilt into something else. She remembers his pain better than she does her own, and she can't stop the anger that bubbles out of her at the unfairness if it all. The anger at Sam and Emily for betraying her, anger at her parents for never telling her, never preparing her. The anger at whoever chose them all for this supernatural bullshit she knows she can’t escape.

Leah screams into her pillow. She lets the anger overtake her so that in the morning, she can wake up, make breakfast and greet her mother and brother as if her life isn’t falling apart around her.


End file.
